Case Study 6-2

We Shall Overcome

In figure 1 we see a photograph of a political demonstration that took place in Paris during May 1968. Its purpose was to underline the importance of social agitation and solidarity between students and workers during a period of social and political unrest. The high vantage point of the camera allows the viewer to see the processional nature of the demonstrators moving forward as a group. It captures a feeling of strength and resolve. It is typical of the kind of image favoured by demonstrators as a legitimate expression of their ideals. In contrast with scenes of violence used by the mainstream media reports on political demonstrations the image expresses commitment to a social cause. The banner confirms collectivist principles associated with social protest meetings of this kind.

Link to Figure 1

Figure 1: Anonymous, Paris May 1968, Ouvriers, Etudiants, Unis Nous Vaincrons (Workers and Students United Shall Overcome).

Activist imagery exists in many different forms and represents a diversity of interpretations and functions. It may be abrasive and troubling or gently persuasive and merely informative. In some cases, activist imagery is shocking and difficult to looks at and extreme examples are hard to justify when they appear in a public space, such as a gallery or museum, in journals, books, news media or online. A key issue we need to address is the witnessing of atrocity and its media representation. Explicit photographs of the dead and dying, of torture and human rights abuse, are extreme examples of the documentary genre. Audiences, often geographically distanced from the scenes they represent, may be forced take sides and consider the implications of what they represent and the media contexts in which they appear. Discussion of photography at the extreme end of social confrontation in war and peacetime violations has engaged recent commentators and critics.

A key factor in this discussion is the use of the camera as a means of reporting problematic and difficult areas of human behavior. Some critics claim the photograph remains a powerful resource for showing and telling what is done in the world. Others raise doubts about the motivation of photographers and the institutions they represent. Social documentary photographers, it is argued, exploit their subjects and the images they create are wasted on apathetic viewers in standard media outlets. Other critics defend documentary as an ethically necessary response to political violence and human suffering. This view rests on the belief that ‘documents of suffering are documents of protest’ as the writer and academic Susie Linfield has argued (2012, 33). Such images may not translate into social change and yet they have testimonial value that plays its part in the ethics of witnessing contemporary horror in the world.

Case Study 6-3

The Camera as Witness

The photograph is an efficient way of knowing the world and seems to offer a standardized and truthful way of seeing. Its power lies in its realism. We have noted elsewhere it can easily be falsified, but when and if this occurs it is judged to be a deviation from the material detail that would otherwise appear in a given image. The photography historian Vicki Goldberg says the ‘the photograph is a highly efficient means of cultural communication’ (Goldberg, 1993: 135). More recently the art historian Antigoni Memou notes photography’s ‘close relationship with history and politics’ and underlines the importance of the medium as means of raising public awareness in ways that lead to solidarity and support for social movements (Memou, 2013: 86).

Memou shows how photography is essential to the dispersal of propaganda messages in the social media as a form of ‘counter information’ working against officialdom and commercial media. Amongst many examples she cites the use of anonymous photography as an important part of the political struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico since the 1990s. Memou notes the Zapatista’s use of professional photojournalism co-existing with images taken by amateurs on mobile phones and digital cameras. She also underlines the importance of ‘non-hierarchical networks’ and the dispersal of images in ‘cyber-communities’ outside official or mainstream media (Memou, 2013: 87).

Linfield also underlines the importance of photography in the spread of ideas. She describes photography as ‘the great democratic medium’ (Linfield, 2012: 13), accessible to all social classes and available for everyday use by non-specialists. The photograph may be the quintessential provider of truth with liberating and revolutionary potential when and if used as a weapon in the struggle for social justice. Memou notes how ‘a renewed belief in the evidential status of photography’ (Memou, 2013: 166) and cites the example of activists re-appropriating journalists’ snapshots of Carlo Guiliani, a young demonstrator who was shot dead by the Italian Carabinieri during the Genoa Group Eight protests of 2001. Memou describes how photographs provided evidence showing the demonstrator was unlawfully killed. She argues that photography contributes to the visibility of political struggle and can be made to work against official government reports and commercial mass media (Memou, 2013: 87).

Link to Figure 2

Figure 2:  Anon., Carlo Guiliani, G8 protestor, died in Genoa, 20 July 2001.

Photographs of Carlo Guiliani, circulated on activists’ website and blogs, created global interest in his death and made his image a symbol of revolutionary political unrest (Fig. 2). The campaigning zeal of activists seldom has immediate policy changing effects. The materials they accumulate (including photographs) are often lost or forgotten. Others achieve canonic status and endure as symbols for ideas and beliefs. Past examples of the conversion of an image to enduring power and influence can been found on the left and right of the political spectrum. Examples of photographic documentary images that have continuing influence include Kent State Girl Screaming Over Dead Body, taken during an anti-war protest in the United States by John Paul Filo in 1970 (Fig. 3), the ubiquitous portrait of the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (photographed by Alberto Korda in 1960), the raising of the American flag on the Japanese Island of Iwo Jiwa during the Second World War (Joe Rosenthal, 1945), and The Migrant Mother, a portrait of a destitute mother and two children, taken by Dorothea Lange at Nipomo in California in 1936.

Link to Figure 3

Figure 3: John Paul Filo, Kent State Girl Screaming Over Dead Body, May 4, 1970.

The power of the image and its use as a technique of persuasion can be over stated. Activist photography is no match for the wider problem a given subject may seem to present. The camera can seldom be used to punish a crime and yet that may not be the point. Images of cruelty are evidence of crime and social injustice. The pioneering documentary photographer, and social activist, Lewis Hine photographed emotionally laden images of children forced into manual work in Carolina cotton mills in early twentieth century America. He described his aim as follows:

There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show things that had to be appreciated (quoted in Bogre, 2012: xii).

The photographic image (whatever its mode of dissemination) remains a memorable way of conveying the reality of suffering in the world. Images printed in recent publications by Michelle Bogre (2012), Susie Linfield (2012) and Jay Prosser et al (2012) are piercingly affective. It is perhaps true that photographic representations of shocking materials can often break down habitual ways of seeing things. This is a key point in defense of activist photography to which we shall return. 

Case Study 6-4

Moments of Horror

Photography produces ‘still moments’ selected from a sequence of events. As we have noted a photograph may come to symbolize an occasion when an event (possibly an atrocious event) took place. A photograph serves its rhetorical purpose better than a film or verbal discourse because it represents in a summary way a larger event. When an image generates a public response to abuse and cruelty it survives in the public memory. Examples include documentary photographs of the Sharpeville massacre in apartheid South Africa, and Civil Rights demonstrators attacked by police dogs in the United States. A still photograph is potentially iconic and archival materials are an indispensable resource. Examples of social response to images of atrocity (death camps and the savagery they recall) allow audiences to reach back to their forebears and reflect upon iniquities of the past.

Photographs of atrocity capture something that-has-been.They are deeply affecting because they show an inviolable aspect of something that was there, happening in front of the camera. Social responsiveness to ongoing social conflict and crisis in the world may have greater urgency than historically dated imagery (Phelan, 2012: 53) and yet we experience sadness for the lost lives of innocent people whatever their place in history. Images of Sioux Indians massacred at Wounded Knee or of Cambodian children awaiting execution have great emotional impact. It is an effect that will stay with these images as long as they exist and as long as people understand what they represent. As the theorist Nancy K. Miller notes, ‘Looking at photographs of atrocity forces the spectator into ethical crisis’ (Miller, 2012: 148).

Recent examples of such images, expressing varying degrees of terror and disgust, confirm Miller’s observation. They include the crucifixion-like image of Ali Shalal al-Quasi taken at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison, in Iraq where prisoners were tortured by American soldiers in 2003 (see Rethinking Photography, Chapter 6, figure 6.8). Earlier historical examples of atrocity include the falling man at the World Trade Center taken on the 11th September 2001 by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew (printed in The New York Times on September 12, 2001), Susan Meiselas’ photograph (Fig. 4) taken in Nicaragua of a badly mutilated body of a rebel lying on a hillside (Cuesta del Plomo, 1978),and napalm scalded children in Vietnam, captured in the Pulitzer prize winning photograph by photojournalist Nick Ut (1972). Linfield observes the falling man ‘presents us with terrorism as human experience, not just a political crime’ (Linfield, 2001: 1). The falling man is a powerfully iconic image of atrocity. Published only once in The New York Times, it is now available online but rarely seen in print. It is hard to imagine an equivalent level of psychological trauma expressed in this photograph occurring in any other medium.

Link to Figure 4

Figure 4: Susan Meiselas, Cuesta del Plomo, 1978.

Case Study 6-5

Picturing Atrocity and Warfare

The critic Susan Sontag claimed the ‘shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings’ (Sontag, 1979: 20). She later reversed this thought - ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us’ (Sontag, 2004: 102) she announced – before speculating on the question of whether we ‘suffer enough when we see these images’ (Sontag, 2004: 104). Audiences are often insulated from atrocity by social and geographical distance. Stereotypes and distorting narratives sustain differences that are codified in different ways. Prosser underlines the divide between the context in which pictures of atrocity are received and the subject they represent:

The conventions of atrocity photographs can rely on showing people whose conditions is often emblematized by their state of undress, or nakedness, or other forms of bodily vulnerability. The state of the body in the photograph and the state of the body viewing the photograph could not be more different (Prosser, 2012: 9).

 

Comments of this kind often seek to underline the mismatch between the viewer and the viewed. They reveal not only insensitivity to social difference but also the cultural appropriation of suffering. The art historian Griselda Pollock observes the effect of mediated cultural memory. She speaks of nakedness ‘as a dimension of torture inflicted by the Nazis on their victims’ (Pollock, 2012: 68) and asks her readers the question: is female “nudity,” eroticized in photographic representations of murderous assaults on the female body in the examples she cites. Pollock speculates whether the horror, in this kind of example, is exploited in sexualized mediation. Her argument underlines of the dangers of viewing habits that ‘anesthetize’ violence. The association of death with the feminine sublimates atrocity. She reminds us the social mediation of violence is always problematical. In a related argument Memou quotes the journalistic aside: ‘When it bleeds, it leads’, (Memou, 2013: 50) and yet photographic images of torture and death are not common in the mainstream media formats and are often subject to censorship. This rule applies generally except in the case of enemy casualties or victims from distant lands. Memou notes:

Pictures of victims of violence in remote and exotic continents or victims of enemy dead bodies do not conform to the same rules as pictures of our own victims. The Western media tends to represent enemy casualties far more often than our own (Memou, 2013: 53).  

Decisions made about the appropriateness of a photographic shoot are made by photographers in the normal line of duty. There is, however, another kind photograph taken by snap shooters or anonymous professionals that find media outlets by default. It is a kind of photograph that is distinguished by a photographer’s complicity with the scene he or she records. Photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib and archival portraits of prisoners awaiting execution at notorious Soviet and Cambodian prisons are examples of images made for personal or institutional use. Prosser refers to the ‘trophy photographs – which are symbols of conquest of others’ such as those taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, ‘photographs taken as spoils of atrocity’ (Prosser, 2012: 9) and Linfield discusses the phenomena of ‘photographs that celebrate cruelty rather than condemn it’ (Linfield, 2012: 51). The museum curator Hilary Roberts notes how far these images represent ‘the imposition of degradation, cruelty and atrocity on a vanquished enemy, in a manner completely contrary to most established moral codes’ (Roberts, 2012: 202). These images increase suffering and may even be encouragement to further abuse of victims. They are in any case the polar opposite to campaigning photojournalism and the progressive ideals of political activism. ‘Trophy photographs’ are deviant forms of documentary that invite comparison with other forms of media exploitation and political violence. 

There are many voices that express opposition to the illicit use and divisive influence of documentary photography. Images of cruelty reinforce negative social stereotypes. Photographs can be used for good or ill and their effectiveness relies on contextual determinations and influence. The anthropologist and photojournalist Richard Cross died a violent death in Central America in 1983. He supported the revolution in Nicaragua and in 1982 published, along with the poet Ernesto Cardenal, a book entitled Nicaragua: The War of Liberation. Cross’ work is described in the following text:

As a young thinking photojournalist, Richard [Cross] was not satisfied with merely getting the ‘right’ picture – an image that conformed to an often unarticulated set of editorial decision, sometimes aesthetic, sometimes political, as imposed by photo agencies and staffs of popular publications. It became clear that Richard felt a growing sense of responsibility for images he ‘took from’ people and ‘gave to’ the viewing public. The political context of image publications became an increasingly important problem in his practice of photography (anthropologist Richard Charen, quoted in Levi Strauss, 2005, 21).

The work of the American Richard Cross (Fig. 5) exemplifies photojournalism as a socially productive medium. The success of a documentary photography requires a relation of trust with picture editors and an ethical basis for nature of the work. It also requires an acceptance of the benefits of contact with a primal scene, rather than an imaginary version of it. Photographs by Cross were published in mainstream newspapers and journals including The New York Times, Newsweek and Time.

Link to Figure 5

Figure 5: Richard Cross, Salvadoran Troops, 1 January 1982, Institute for Arts and Media, CSUN.

Photojournalists work for a wide range of independent campaigning organizations such as Greenpeace, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), Amnesty International, Facing Change, Documenting America (FCDA) and various international charities across the world. Photographs deployed by these organizations engage the professional interest of news editors, broadcasters, museum curators, photojournalists, artists, researchers, and academics. As print journalism declined, new media created new distribution opportunities for the publication of documentary photography. The academic and writer Michelle Bogre notes the success of FCDA, an organization set up in 2009, and inspired by the Farm Security Administration and its activist project in the 1930s. It is an organization dedicated to publicizing social issues in the United States that are ignored or under-reported in mainstream media (Bogre, 2012: 38).

Case Study 6-6

Activism and Art Photography

Most documentary photographs focus on portrayal of human subjects in straitened circumstances. The label ‘activism’ does, however, extend into cognate areas of green radicalism, movements campaigning against ‘car culture’ and various forms of direct action politics or broader environmental matters. More engaged forms of activism are distanced from the work of contemporary artists and yet the two fields are not unrelated. Landscape photography, for example, is largely centered on the art world and yet many practitioners relate their work to environmental issues that extend beyond purely aesthetic work. Climate change, melting glaciers, rising seas and the extinction of species are listed amongst the interests of a wide range of artist photographers. Photographers travel to frozen wastes (Olaf Otto Becker and Sebastião Delgado), deserts, mountains, rivers, oceans and forests and other natural sites that have so far evaded the ravages of human society. The idea of spiritual renewal associated with unspoiled places in the world represents a kind of romanticism against the tide of modernity. Others, such as Edward Burtynsky, making a similar point, focus on the extremes of environmental degradation.

The boundary lines between art and politics are blurred. Whether this allows for a genuine photography of advocacy to find an art world audience may be doubted.  The dangers of co-option and aesthetic submersion of the political voice are well known. Photographic art, nevertheless, travels well and appears in places outside the academy. In many practices the boundary between document and art is pragmatically ignored as photographers publish and exhibit where they can. The success of photography in the art world has widened access and popularized contemporary practice. The work of the documentary photographers Philip Jones Griffiths and Don McCullin, including their work in Vietnam in the 1960s, occupies an important place in an expanded and politically responsive socio-cultural framework.

Case Study 6-7

Photography as Activism: A Defense

Michelle Bogre says the role of the activist is ‘to provoke emotion and compel action’ (Bogre, 2012: 17). Activism is the name given to a diversity of practices that range from snapshot photographs of political rallies to professional work of ‘un-embedded’ freelancers and photojournalists. Such work often takes place in crisis zones and dangerous parts of the world. Activists become accustomed to different cultures and adjust to new social milieus as the principal sites of their project. Their work is linked with trans-global organizations operating across state boundaries. Doctors Without Borders for example helps people ‘affected by armed conflict, epidemics and natural or manmade disasters’, works in seventy countries and, as its own publicity notes, goes to ‘places others cannot or choose not to go’ (www.msf.org.uk). Pictures are clearly useful to organizations that need to educate audiences about the situations they are witnessing and raise funds. Documentary images used by organizations such as Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders generally avoid the more gruesome images of death and destruction.

Photographers working for these organizations understand the difficulty of representing sensitive issues and moments of crisis without reproducing a stereotype. They are often aware that mainstream media operate a system of omissions and censorship or selective choice of images that may discredit target groups (choosing images of looters rather than voluntary aid workers or scenes of ugly confrontation rather than peaceful protest). The media itself so easily becomes part of the atrocity if it ignores a violation or misrepresents it. Prosser calls this a ‘failure of seeing’ which can be reinforced by inept or distorting news stories. The problem of the siting of the image is a key issue that engages theoretical studies in this area. The way we see an image is clearly affected by the authority (or lack of authority) that attaches to the media organization that disseminates it. The image is always a disputable object and can be challenged and redefined at the point of its reception.

It is, nevertheless, perverse to argue that campaigning photography should be denounced as a compromised medium. Critical discourse of any kind is compromised and the work of a high-minded photographer is no different in this regard to the work of others. Linfield and Bogre have shown the work of activist photographers has ethical probity and social value. Bogre underlines the contribution photography makes to organizations that rely on a supply of engaged and critical imagery. Linfield is more circumspect in her view of the capacity of photography to effect social change. Her defense of activist photography is moderated by a sense of its limitations. It is as if she agrees with Sontag’s cautionary view that ‘the ethical content of photographs is fragile’ (Sontag, 1979: 21). Linfield notes:

There is no doubt… that photography has, more than any other twentieth-century medium, exposed violence – made violence visible – to millions of people all over the globe. Yet the history of photography shows just how limited and inadequate such exposure is: seeing does not necessarily translate into believing, caring, or acting. That is the dialectic, and the failure, at the heart of the photograph of suffering (Linfield, 2012: 33).

Activist photography may show a victim transfigured by the aesthetic process at its command. Cruelty is undoubtedly, and correctly, a matter for agonistic reflection and concern. The picture of cruelty is never merely evidence of an historical event. It is itself a constitutive part of history with its own responsibilities. And yet the prospective abuse of meaning in the process of its social mediation was never justification to do nothing or turn away from the spectacle. Linfield approvingly quotes the German philosopher Theodore Adorno who, despite his deepest reservations, said ‘no art that avoided the victims could stand up to the demands of justice’ (quoted in Linfield, 2012: 45). The defense of the campaigning documentary photographer is not instrumentally linked to the matter of its moral outcome. Its defense lies in its negation of the refusal to look at the problem.

Case Study 6-8

Two Views: Realism and Postmodernism

Recent debate on activist photography is divided with viewpoints on the side of skepticism and others on the side of campaigning practitioners. Postmodernists for example scoff at the idea of photographic truth. In this view all representational forms, they argue, including photographs, are mediations and what passes for ‘truth’ is therefore reducible to conventional ways of seeing world. The danger of the image is that it may, in the words of the theorist Nancy Armstrong ‘subdue the feature of an individual in favour of the type or category to which that individual belonged’ (Armstrong, 2010: 109). This recalls the ‘archives of subjection’ (including prisoners, ethnic minorities and the colonized peoples of faraway lands) that feature in Victorian photographs of rigidly posed subjects made to fit the imposed conceptions of the observer.

Such images clearly demonstrate a kind of false realism in which images confirm a repressive social perspective. The cautionary view of images, as we have noted, is valid and necessary. And yet in the extreme version of this cautionary perspective photographic truth is always deemed to be a construction as if what we see can never be trusted. In this ‘postmodernist’ way of thinking, what a photograph is of is circumscribed by its place in ‘an inflexible regime of power’ (Roberts, 1998: 4). In other words the photo is judged to be a piece of coded reality and what we actually see, when we view it, is always secondary to how it is delineated on its travels in the world. In this dystopian backwater of doubt, the intentions and ideals of the photographer are subsumed in a network of institutional imperatives.

If the photograph is heavily coded – as the postmodernist believes – it has no meaning beyond what might be inferred from its own mediations in the world. In his book Camera Lucida Roland Barthes mocks this kind of intellectualism:

The realists, of whom I am one and of whom I was already one when I asserted the Photograph was an image without a code – even if, obviously, certain codes do inflect our reading of it – the realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for a past reality: a magic, not an art… The important thing is that photographs possess an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation (Barthes, 1981: 88-89).

This statement may not be the last word on the power of the photographic image but it indicates something about the camera as useful apparatus for taking us back in time in the way Barthes indicates. The testimonial value of the great photo-essays W. Eugene Smith, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White and the imagery of liberated prison camps, machete wounded victims in Rwanda, and recent views of desperate people huddled in leaking boats in the Mediterranean are profoundly moving. This is not merely because the image recalls people as subjects that demand our attention, but rather more because the photograph allows an existential contact with a former (or recently past) event. Atrocity photographs are perhaps an extreme case of our experience of time passing and a reminder of our own fatality.

The activist photographer keeps faith with his vocation and retains a naïve conviction in a medium that speaks to audiences in a particular way. Linfield notes that photography helps us to see cruelty ‘with a literalness and an irrefutability that neither literature nor painting can claim’ (Linfield, 2012: 39). In a similar statement the cultural theorist Parvati Nair observes:

The photograph steals into the viewer’s heart in a way that a painting would find it hard to achieve. Not because of any superiority per se with regard to conveying a visual message, but simply because it tells of a past time, a moment of reality turned into a trace and shadow (Nair, 2011: 150).

As we noted above Sontag spoke of the haunting effect of atrocity photographs and the ethical value of looking at them. In her later writing on photography she reminds us that we are in danger of not seeing the enormity of atrocity. As a visual spectacle the horror may exceed the demands it makes on the viewer and allow him or her to lose sight of the historical circumstances that made such cruelty acceptable to its perpetrators.

As with all images, it may need explanation and contextual data. The emaciated bodies of prisoners in Nazi death camps or victims about to be shot are explicit messages of barbarity at work. The bewildered subjects of the photographic portraits of the thousands murdered by Pol Pot may look strangely normal in their individual frames and yet what they represent is almost too much to bear. The tragedy of Cambodia (c.1975-79), and the horror of what its innocent victims faced, needs some kind of response and explanation. The Activist image needs contextualization and relies on activist discourse. As Linfield argues, convincingly in our view, we cannot help these victims, but that is no excuse for not looking or (perhaps worse) for not knowing about or casting aside the particularity of what they show us. In an answer to postmodern critique of documentary form Linfield says, ‘Looking at these doomed people is not a form of exploitation; forgetting them is not a form of respect’ (Linfield, 2012: 59).

Case Study 6-9

Aesthetic Agency

Finally, we note a key issue that relates to the aesthetics of the photograph and the sense in which horrific content might suit a less-than-perfect interest in photographic craft skill. There is a largely un-theorized view that a well-composed or possibly even beautiful image dilutes the moral force of an atrocity image. The image of atrocity, in this view, is unsuited to anything that might raise it above the tawdry nature of what it shows. Linfield and the writer David Levi Strauss see this as an indefensible point of view. Their argument acknowledges that photography is a hybrid medium oscillating between art and document. An accomplished photographer has skills and aptitudes that guide the work and all creative activity has an aesthetic dimension.

Documentary photography is disparaged as (mere) journalism and yet it has authority, as we have noted, that is absent in other media. Photographs have a direct connection with the world. The cultural theorist Esther Leslie notes the medium allows the visible world to imprint its traces on artistic products (Leslie, 2010: 146). ‘Photography,’ she argues, ‘brings objects closer, presenting them for inspection’ as if they were evidence taken from the scene of crime (Leslie, 2010: 147). Photography involves technical skill and knowledge of past work. Opting for a ‘slummy aesthetic’ as a way signaling authentic feeling for the subject misses the point. The persuasive power of a photograph is a function of its aesthetic content. Linfield advises against confusing ‘aesthetic clumsiness with moral weight’ (Linfield, 2012: 44). Following the German critic Walter Benjamin, Leslie observes:

Photography gives aesthetic expression to the wounds of human alienation, in order that they might be made amenable to ‘curative’ analysis by the ‘politically educated gaze’ (Leslie, 2010: 147).

In the case of the atrocity image we may struggle to match form and content. In what format should the depiction of cruelty appear? A rhetorical question that is answered in different ways by practitioners. The critic who doubts the value of a well-made photograph when it relates to a ‘difficult’ subject presumes a separation of art and politics. ‘Why can’t beauty be a call to action?’ is a question posed by Levi Strauss (Levi Strauss, 2005: 9). He answers himself as follows:

Being politically correct does not signify much unless the work is also visually and conceptually compelling (Levi Strauss, 2005: 9-10).

The two things, idea and form, are related in the documentary photograph as they are in any expressive medium. Aesthetic strategies are not surplus to the political struggle. When documentary and activist photography challenges the separation of aesthetics and politics, it continues in the tradition of the great radical art of the past.

Case Study 6-10

Conclusion

Contemporary opinion on documentary photography is divided between those who think it exploits its subjects and those who think it has a valid role to play in social affairs and makes an important contribution to political debate on matters of great significance. The first group doubts the efficacy of documentary media and often tends to be wary of negative stereotypes in representation of marginalized or persecuted social groups in the world. The second group argues that ignoring atrocity and social catastrophes in the world is unacceptable. If political correctness is self-regarding and morally deficient, as indeed it may be, the work carried out by photojournalists and the organizations they represent, especially those engaged in medical humanitarian aid, or activists struggling for social emancipation, is ethically and politically necessary. Intellectual sophistry fades into the background when organizations such Doctors Without Borders achieve success in the places they visit. The defense of photojournalism does not, however, rely on pragmatic outcomes. We have argued that photographers, often at great personal risk, produce images that demand attention and provide material evidence as a prerequisite for social action.

To say that documentary photographers exploit the sites they visit and the people they report is in any case a generalization. There are examples where exploitation and stereotyping can be used as evidence against photography. This does not, however, apply tout court. Miscreant forms exist in any genre and we must be sensitive to the way images are used and aware that honest pictures can be downgraded and misused. Both sides of the debate contribute to the discussion and yet it is worth noting the hostility to documentary photography in late twentieth century writing has given way to a more expansive and inclusive take on this important subject.

Case Study 6-11

Summary of Key Points

• Activism is a word that describes individuals and groups involved in political or social causes.
• When the term activism is linked with photography it often foregrounds the work of professional photojournalists. The term is now also linked with users of social media and online photo-communities.
• One of the key factors in the discussion about documentary media is the way it can be used to report on sites of repression, incidents of social injustice and struggles for social, political and environmental change.
• Some critics raise doubts about the motivations of photographers and the organizations they represent. It has been argued, for example, that documentary images use human subjects as a resource for their own practices and thus exploit them as raw materials for their own ends. Critics also say the photographic outcomes of documentary work are often misused (or ignored) by politically or morally insensitive audiences.
• Other writers, and documentary photographers themselves, challenge the generalized condemnation of the documentary media. They show it is broadly a force for good and an ethically and politically necessary response to political violence and other forms of social repression in the world.
• Documentary photography became a distinctive practice in the last century and was largely inspired by artists, writers and filmmakers nurtured and developed within the late nineteenth-century realist and early twentieth-century modernist traditions. The great documentary photographers of the inter-war period (the 1920s and 1930s) built on this tradition.
• Contemporary photojournalists work with conventional media including news media and print journalism. Many are also employed by charities and non-government organizations.
• The aesthetic properties of documentary photographs are important aspects of the messages they convey. Following the writers cited we have argued that aesthetic value and social meaning are not opposites. In other words aesthetic properties and attributes often help to make a picture compelling. Conversely, indifference to aesthetic interest may detract from a picture's intended effect.
• Aesthetic strategies are not surplus to political struggle. Documentary and activist photography challenge the separation of aesthetics and politics and in so doing continue in the tradition of the great radical art of the past.

Case Study 6-12

References

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Prosser, Jay; Batchen, Geoffrey; Gidley, Mick; and Miller, Nancy K. (eds), (2012), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, London: Reaktion Books.

Prosser, Jay (2012), ‘Introduction’, in Jay Prosser, et al (eds), pp. 7-13.

Roberts, Hilary (2012), ‘War Trophy Photographs: Proof or Pornography?’, in Jay Prosser, et al (eds), pp. 201-208.

Roberts, John (1998), The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sontag, Susan (1979), On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Sontag, Susan (2004), Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin.